Northern Irish indie rockers and relatively clean-cut looking three piece Two Door Cinema Club have managed to get themselves partially black listed by pay-TV juggernaut MTV over the new video for their track ‘Handshake.’
As Gigwise reports, after airing on UK television on Tuesday evening, the band’s new clip was promptly pulled from MTV playlists and has subsequently been banned from broadcast due to its gruesome content that apparently took it one step too far.
MTV bosses were seemingly unimpressed by the three minute clip that features members of Two Door Cinema club having their heads severed off by seedy looking English actor Martin Hancock.
Hancock’s character then proceeds to take the aforementioned decapitated Irishmen’s heads to a local bowling alley where he uses them as makeshift bowling balls. So far the clip has managed to pull over 300,000 views on the Vevo-sponsored YouTube channel.
The clip could be seen as somewhat distasteful in concept, but why MTV execs decided to pull the plug on it isn’t all too obvious with no scenes involving any directly gory content at all. The dismembered band members don’t even seem particularly opposed to being rolled down the bowling lanes, albeit only looking slightly uncomfortable.
Two Door Cinema Clubs bassist Kevin Baird thinks that news of the ban is “great. We’ve never had anything banned before!” His reaction isn’t all too surprising considering that the added attention that the ban is bringing to the group would probably have more people seeing the clip than if it hadn’t been banned at all. Two Door Cinema Clubs bassist Kevin Baird thinks that news of the ban is “great. We’ve never had anything banned before!”
As shocking as it is to discover that MTV actually still airs music videos as part of its regular programming (admittedly the most of which are played on its myriad of genre-specific sister channels), what’s even more interesting is to look at the countless lists of clips that have previously been banned by the Music Television network. The Two Door Cinema Club clip is the latest in a long line of (supposedly) controversial music videos that MTV have felt compelled to pull from its programming.
As Citywise points out, infamous clips including Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love,’ The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, and Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ have all been labelled by MTV as over-stepping the boundaries of suitable broadcasting.
Even Rick James’ ‘Super Freak’ wasn’t allowed to air due to MTV bosses claiming that the song didn’t fit their “rock format” – despite being a blatantly obvious racist cop out – policies by which the network couldn’t hide behind two years later at the release of Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean.’
In regards to the MTV-shunned Two Door Cinema Club clip, directed by seasoned music video producer Sam Pilling who’s produced clips for the likes of Wu Lyf, SBTRKT and David Lynch, bassist Baird tells NME: “It’s a bit of a break with the past. I think we’ve done one or two very good videos and a couple of very average ones. We wanted to do something a bit spectacular this time, and I honestly do think it’s the best thing we’ve ever shot.”
It’s a wonder what MTV would make of the highly sexualised new video from Is Tropical, easily the year’s most NSFW video that demonstrates why you shouldn’t leave a frustrated teenager alone at home.
In related music video news, we’ve also seen the release of the most amazing interactive music video you’ll ever see, made by Dutch band Light Light. The Netherlands-based band has a viral hit on their hands thanks to an online music video described as being ‘crowdsourced’, but instead of asking for funds from fans, they’re asking for people’s mouse cursors.
The new music video is essentially an interactive game that tracks and records your mouse pointer’s movements in a series of activities and instructions, then adds each subsequent play-through to the finished video, resulting in a swarm of pointers that move (mostly) in unison to the soundtrack and various on-screen instructions.
